Throughout the United States and any many parts of the world there are many areas of land which contain fertile, cultivatible soil which, however, it has been uneconomical to cultivate and farm because the land contains embedded therein rocks of various sizes and/or contains rocks partially embedded in the surface of the land. These lands having embedded or partially embedded therein numerous rocks heretofore have been unsuitable for farming or cultivation because of the presence of the rocks causing damage and/or breaking the conventionally used plowing and/or tilling machinery.
The manual digging and removal of rocks and the lifting of the rocks onto trucks or other conveyances have been uneconomical and even with unskilled labor it has been cost prohibitive to clear the land. In addition, this type of work is back breaking and even among unskilled laborers few are willing or able to do the work.
Though there is commercially available machinery and equipment that will pick up small and medium size rocks from the surface of the ground, there has not been any equipment available that would dig up rocks from below the surface of the ground and/or rocks partially embedded in the ground and remove them to other areas. There is also machinery available that will dig into the ground to cut deeply rooted weeds which machinery inherently lifts rocks embedded in the ground or partially embedded in the ground. This machinery, however, merely turns the ground over and dumps the soil and rock back onto the ground to again partially embed the rocks in the ground.
There therefore exists and has existed for some time a serious need for machinery and equipment that could economically and effectively remove rocks from soil to a depth sufficient to allow farming and cultivation of the soil using modern farm machinery and equipment. The development of such machinery and equipment would readily bring into production large areas of otherwise unusable fertile and cultivatible land to produce food for a hungry and needy world.